Encephalartos woodii (E. woodii) is an extremely rare plant in the Encephalartos genus and calls the great Ngoya Forest in South Africa its home. It predates dinosaurs and has survived several mass extinctions. However, the last time the tree was found in the wild was in 1895. The botanist John Medley Wood found the tree during his botanical expedition in the Ngoye Forest. Fearing its extinction, scientists recovered offset from its original stem and grew them in botanic gardens. Since then, it’s believed to be extinct in the wild.
An estimated 500 individual clones of the original exist, but here’s the catch: since only the male E. woodii was found, the clones are all male. With no female around, the plant hasn’t performed reproduction naturally in years. Paleontologist Richard Fortey even referred to it as the most solitary organism in the world. This may change as researchers at C-LAB are using AI to find our lonely friend a mate.
Aerial view
Led by Laura Cinti with Howard Boland and Debbie Jewitt, the initiative “AI in the Sky” utilizes drone and AI technology to scan for a female E. woodii in the vast and unexplored regions of the Ngoye Forest. For reference, females have a cone typically larger than males. It also grows megasporophylls (a form of leaf structure) larger and less densely packed than the microsporophylls the males grow.
Using this information, Tim Baker, Nolan Munien, and Jewitt used a drone to survey the area to look for the female. According to C-LAB, they used a DJI Matrice 300 “equipped with a Micasense RedEdge-MX multispectral sensor and programmed to fly in a grid over two selected areas covering a total area of 195 acres, collecting a total of 15,780 images.”
The drone’s multispectral camera takes images of five discrete wavelength bands: blue, green, red (visible to us), Red edge, and Near InfraRed (invisible to us). Each wavelength helps distinguish different features of the plant. Researchers compiled the photos into a mosaic map and analyzed them visually to locate a possible female in the forest.
Ongoing search
With no success yet, it seems that the search for the female E. woodii is in a state of limbo. Researchers are continuously refining and training the AI model for enhanced aerial search missions. Researchers are looking into an alternative, including one that involves converting the cloned males into females. This is done using “alternative conservation strategies that look at chemically and environmentally inducing sex change from the existing male plants.”
YouTube: Living Dead – On the Trail of the Female
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Photo credits: All images are owned by C-LAB and have been provided with permission to be used.
Source: SANBI / C-LAB project page
